Cultural history is a type of analysis that rejects positivist assumptions about the world, and instead raises questions about the fundamental ways knowledge is understood in historical contexts. This approach challenges historians to think critically about the kinds of ideologies that inform our understanding of the world, and how these preconceptions may manifest themselves as evidence in research-based activities. The goal is not to eradicate science and rationality from analysis as a whole, rather, it is to rigorously question what truly can be considered empirical, and then to incorporate it in a way that is careful and aware. In Workers and the Working Class in the Middle East, the perception and interpretation of “class” is re-examined with sociopolitical and cultural identities included as analytical tools, as an alternative to the standard Marxist interpretation of class as related solely to the means of production. Ziad Fahmy’s Street Sounds is a perfect case study of how to extrapolate on the idea of “class” as a cultural concept.
The driving force behind the so-called “cultural turn” in the social sciences is the search for a standard of truth. This results in a questioning of how culture plays a role in the development of the natural sciences, which has been embraced as objective and rational, due to the influence of the Enlightenment in the Western context. Postmodernists have aggressively pursued new ways of thinking to critically assess how such Western rationalism affects attainment and categorization of knowledge. This work is certainly crucial to the field of history, whose primary activity revolves around the documentation and dissemination of previously attained knowledge.
A problematic area of the introduction of cultural analysis into the social sciences is that of distinction– where should cultural analysis end? This bleeds into other important methodological questions. There are two key areas where distinction becomes contrived– first, it often muddies the boundaries between disciplines. Historians and sociologists must engage in a more complex dialogue, in order to understand how cultural indoctrination affects research in each of their respective fields. One can argue that the collapse of disciplinary boundaries is not necessarily a bad thing. However, this runs the risk of revisionism– how does one incorporate a new idea into existing projects? What does social science with a “cultural bent” look like? Is this cultural venture truly producing worthwhile insights? Second, the boundary between where the reach of culture ends is also an area of distinctive confusion. The cultural turn suggests that culture does not end in the social sciences– it is wholly encompassing. If culture includes the way that we do science, how do we identify what is truly objective, scientific fact?
An example of fruitful cultural analysis can be found in Ziad Fahmy’s Street Sounds. Though the book expands upon the traditional conception of a historical project, it does not stray so far from the real as to prevent the possibility of deriving useful conclusions. The conception of sound as politics, examining the relation of sound to power– these are areas in which knowledge can yet still be expanded. These ideas serve as good starting points to answer big social questions about class identity through the perspective of those living through it themselves, and the legitimacy of these claims is furthered by Fahmy’s grounding in real sensory experiences. As we work to disentangle the confusion brought about by rapid modernization and of modernity itself, a return to the most basic of perceptual truths is most likely necessary.